Top Podcasts on Apple's AI and Hardware Moves

“Apple CEO Tim Cook published a new letter on Apple website today looking back on Apple history... 'April 1st marks 50 years of Apple. From the first Apple computer to the Mac, from the iPod to the iPhone, the iPad to Apple Watch and AirPods, as well as the services we use every day, we've spent five decades rethinking what's possible and putting powerful tools into people's hands.'”

“Move ahead however long it's been, and we find Apple taking in close to a billion dollars in AI-related revenue per year. The journal has analytics firm AppMagic estimating that generative AI apps paid Apple somewhere in the neighborhood of $900 million in app store fees in 2025. While $900 million would keep me in bourbon for a bit, the journal points out that it's not a lot of money for Apple.”

“I found Tim Cook's leadership really disappointing over the past year and change. I still dig Apple hardware and Apple TV, both the hardware and the subscription service. Where I get really jazzed, though, Apple is one of, if not the, greatest business story I can imagine. From the Jobs Garage to the Apple II to the fateful trip to Xerox PARC that gave us the Mac, which pretty much gave us modern computing.”

“"Apple is the company that's currently being presented to solve that problem. My bet is they're going to nail it, at least within the next kind of two to three years for two reasons. One, they have the largest distribution, I was mentioning earlier, 3 billion active devices. So it's easy for them to kind of turn that on. Their biggest threat actually might be Google."”

“By every standard AI metric, Apple is losing. They're not selling tokens. They're not building data centres. They're not doing advanced research. And yet, their hardware is the machinery on which the most advanced AI users on the planet are actually running their day-to-day. So, what is this race that Apple is actually running? As one of the big tech giants, Apple has really been noticeable in its absence in the AI race.”

“There were reports about iPhone designers getting large, significant bonuses in stock that would vest over a few years, but roughly around 400k to 500k to keep them on the team because we had heard about this talent drain where people are just pulling apple talent specifically open ai and others... this is definitely affecting apple and I'm curious how it plays out.”

“Apple is planning to spend just $14 billion in 2026. We'll see that it's a completely diverging strategy from the rest of big tech, and we're going to see how it plays out for them. Apple just makes money always It seems like they have made a billion dollars in AI revenue this year primarily from the 30 App Store cut that they are taking Again Apple has been afforded this position as being the de facto platform that everyone has to distribute their apps on so they get to take their cut of revenue from that.”

“They wanted to get into AI, of course, but you can't do AI level computations on a phone. You have to send it off to much bigger servers, data centers somewhere, right? So how is Apple going to do that while still keeping your data 100% protected? So they invented this new server architecture where your data goes to the server, it's processed, it answers your question, sends it back to you, and then immediately erases the data.”

“The journal says Apple own benchmarks show the M5 running a 30 billion parameter model capable of drafting legal briefs, debugging code, synthesizing research in under three seconds on a standard MacBook Pro. 18 gigabytes of memory, no internet, no subscription, no API key. The trick is an architectural advance called Mixture of Experts. The model carries 30 billion parameters, but fires only 3 billion per query.”

“Apple has like the world's best engineers, like cream of the cream. Everybody wants to go to Apple as talent. They also have this unbelievable installed base, 2.2 billion customers... But when it comes to those on the AI team... a lot of AI researchers and workers have left Apple to be poached by other companies.”

“Apple said 50 years of thinking different. And then they wrote, 50 years ago in a small garage, a big idea was born. Apple was founded on the simple notion that technology should be personal. And that belief, M-radical at the time, M-changed everything. April 1st marks 50 years of Apple. From the first Apple computer to the Mac, from iPod to iPhone, iPad to Apple Watch and AirPods, as well as the services we use every day.”

“This private cloud compute thing is just so freaking cool. So AI queries that are too complicated to handle on the phone, they send to a data center to run on big servers, just like any AI company. The difference is, Apple says, both your query and the answer after it's sent back to you are instantly wiped off the server, never to be seen again with no record. And everyone's like, yeah, sure, sure it is. But no. Then they say, feel free, researchers, scientists, competitors, feel free to come and look at the code and see if what we're doing is what we're doing.”